Green Left Weekly: more than a good idea

By Lisa Macdonald
With this issue, Green Left Weekly turns 200. This is a tremendous achievement, one we hardly dared to forecast with confidence four and a half years ago. Like all projects that dare to be different, there have been times when we thought we might not make it, when we have teetered on that cutting edge we strove so hard to reach.
With the arrival of this special week, however, those hard times — all those weeks when we needed personal loans to pay the printer for that issue, or the months of battling council officers for the right to sell Green Left on public streets — fade into the background.
This paper with "attitude", which has consistently challenged all of the fundamental ills of this society — sexism, racism, imperialism, exploitation, environmental destruction, censorship and the rest — has not simply survived, but has grown from strength to strength.
Red and green
Green Left Weekly grew out of attempts in the late 1980s to overcome the fragmentation of the Australian left. The idea for the project was publicly announced in a supplement to the September 25, 1990 issue of Direct Action, the weekly newspaper of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), which was celebrating 20 years of publication.
That announcement said: "The assessment of those of us who have been producing Direct Action is that what's needed today is a broader paper that can be used in all their political campaigns by a much wider and greater number of progressive movements.
"The current political situation demands a more united response ... that fully encompasses the green spectrum as well as the red, as the threat to the very existence of life on this planet grows more acute each year ... more and more people are drawing the conclusion that there is a link between the struggle to save the environment and the fight for social justice on behalf of the downtrodden of the world.
"The goal is to make such a new paper in reality the weapon for all those in struggle, and a forum for all the movements. It's your paper. Take part in its success."
With these aims and political perspectives, Green Left was the first newspaper of its kind in Australia. Aside from the DSP and Resistance, there were no large organisations backing the paper. However, right from the start a broad range of activists sponsored it, made use of it for publicising events, for information and for discussion, wanted to buy it and were willing to help circulate it.
Breaking the silence
Since the first issue rolled off the presses on February 16, 1991, Green Left has been a medium in which real debates take place — around the politics of Green electoral formations, the population debate, postmodernism, and the attitude of socialists to the ALP, to name a few. The diverse and often controversial content of the letters page each week indicates that readers want to make known their agreements or disagreements with articles that appear in GLW, and on other topics as well.
Breaking the silence that is imposed on alternative perspectives and ideas by the big business media, by this society's education and legal systems has always been a goal of GLW.
Over the years, as more and more progressive people have found out about GLW and realised that they can have an uncensored say, the paper has built up a broad base of contributors from almost every social movement, sector and region in the country. Consequently, Green Left is now acknowledged as a unique source of accurate, detailed and up-to-date information about a wide range of green and left issues and events that is not available anywhere else.
In addition to the thousands of individual subscribers to the paper, dozens of state and national libraries now subscribe, as do an increasing number of schools, secondary colleges and universities. Journalists in the establishment media and in alternative radio and television regularly use Green Left as an information source; original articles from GLW have been reprinted in magazines in over 10 countries, and every week GLW receives numerous information requests from researchers, students and political organisations in Australia and from overseas.
Networks and campaigns
A basic characteristic of capitalist society is that it isolates, divides and alienates people. Notions of collectivity and solidarity are distorted and broken down. In this context, linking people, organisations and their ideas was central to the original concept of GLW and has become a major role of the paper.

Within Australia, GLW links people within and between the large cities, as well as those living in more isolated areas with the movements based in the major cities. With the first issue in 1991, Green Left was only available in nine cities and towns in Australia. That number is now over 50.
But GLW does much more than act as a vehicle for the exchange of information and ideas between people. Launched in the midst of mass opposition to Australia's role in the Gulf War, GLW has, from the start been a campaigning paper which aims to undermine the tendency of capitalism to disempower, pacify and deactivate people.
The people who read, write for and distribute Green Left are not simply passive consumers of a media product. They are active contributors to the movement for change.

When we say, "Green Left is your paper", we mean, "This paper can help you change the world". And it has. Through GLW, activists are armed with factual information not available anywhere else; a forum for discussion about campaign goals, strategies and tactics, even with people on the other side of the country; and a comprehensive listing of campaign activities and events in which they can participate.
The role of GLW as a valuable tool for activists in the recent campaigns against woodchipping in old growth forests, for independence for East Timor and for a nuclear-free Pacific, for example, has been widely recognised by those movements' friends and foes alike.
One planet, one struggle
Over time, Green Left has gradually extended its networking to include dozens of countries in the First and Third Worlds.
Continuing the tradition of Direct Action, the international coverage in GLW has always been one of the paper's strengths — a recognition that, in the era of imperialism, struggles for social justice and ecological sustainability cannot be confined within national, continental or regional boundaries.
Green Left began with only nine overseas correspondents. There are now 22, in addition to the journalists we have been able to send overseas to provide eyewitness reports on important political developments such as the coverage of South African politics and the first democratic elections there by Norm Dixon, and Renfrey Clarke's coverage of developments in Russia following the collapse of the USSR.
Today there are more than 100 GLW subscribers living in 37 other countries, many of whom distribute the paper through their own green and left networks. The success to date of the annual GLW fund appeal, which has raised more than $100,000 each year since 1991, has enabled us to make the paper available to many people in the Third World who could otherwise not afford it.
We are pleased to announce with this issue that the contribution Green Left has already been able to make linking people and movements across the globe will soon take another step forward with the posting of every issue onto the World Wide Web electronic mail system.
The future
Radical activists throughout history have known that it takes more than just good ideas to change the world. While there is no doubt that GLW was a good idea at a time of need for the radical movements in this country, all the achievements of this project have only been made possible by the thousands of people who, over the years, have written, drawn and photographed for the paper; spent countless hours on the streets and campuses ensuring that as many people as possible had access to it; donated their hard-earned cash to help finance it; and, at the end of the day, read and appreciated it.
To all those Green Left Weekly supporters — congratulations. Here's to the next 200 weeks of breaking the silence and campaigning together for a free, just and green world for all.